ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 19)

S T R AT E G Y BY GREG LEVIN for vice presidents, directors and managers with strategic responsibilities M The Viability of Video Contact Centers The technology that drives video contacts may be maturing, but are customers and contact centers ready for video calls? Industry experts offer their views. Did the agent who handled your call look professional and friendly? It’s highly unlikely that the above question is included in your current post-call customer survey. That question, however, may not be considered so odd in the near future. Several technology analysts and others in our industry believe that contact centers and customers alike will soon embrace video contacts — pointing out that the technology driving such contacts is ready for primetime, and that customers are hungry for more personalized live support. “One hundred percent customer satisfaction is the score all enterprises aim for, says Mona Sultan, an analyst on the ” Customer Interaction Technologies team at Datamonitor. “Video can be a wonderful tool to achieve this, as it can break down facile barriers that exist with faceless telephone conversations. ” Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president of IP contact center technology provider CosmoCom, offers a similar sentiment. “The big advantage [of video in the contact center] is the enhanced customer bond created by expanding the human dimension of the customer care interaction. ” Until now, video contact centers (VCCs) have been held in check for various reasons — to some extent because of technological shortcomings on the VCC side, but even more so because of technological barriers on the caller side. Until recently, most customers’ phones were not video-enabled, and many customers' homes and some businesses were not equipped with the bandwidth needed for video contacts to occur. Today, however, with the proliferation of broadband Internet and state-of-the-art mobile phones, most consumers have access to real-time video communications via Mona Sultan, video-enabled handsets, Web cameras, video kiosks and videoDatamonitor analyst icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | JANUARY 2008 19 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

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